Retrato de una dama llamada Esmeralda Brandini

For all it looks like a piece of 15th-century Florence, this portrait owes part of its present face to Victorian London. In 1867 the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti bought it at auction for a small sum, drawn like his circle to early Italian art, and while he owned it he retouched parts of the panel, the woman's white cap and, it now seems, areas of her face. The name attached to her, Smeralda, was probably invented later by descendants of the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, keen to gild the family tree. Rossetti sold it in 1880 to the collector Constantine Ionides, whose huge bequest carried it into the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1900.